


It’s an old song

by historymiss



Category: Gideon the Ninth - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: Gen, Oneshot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-17
Updated: 2019-10-17
Packaged: 2020-12-21 01:47:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 337
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21066758
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/historymiss/pseuds/historymiss
Summary: Cytherea watches the past happen all over again (She is a necromancer, and Canaan House is the end of death- why didn’t she expect her ghosts to return?)





	It’s an old song

The air at Canaan House still smells the same. Salt and shuttle exhaust, the rich and rotting stink of the sea so thick it fills her mouth like blood. Cytherea doesn’t know why she expected it to be different, but it hits her like a blow to the gut. 

She staggers, coming out of the shuttle, and her control isn’t so fine on Protesilaus just yet. Cytherea can’t move him fast enough to catch her.

The next thing she knows, she’s looking at her own reflection, twinned in mirrored glass. The features around it are daubed black and white and anxious, no control over the concern that haunts every face Cytherea has ever seen.

She is so young. She burns with it, and it’s all Cytherea can do not to drink her dry.

And all at once the second blow comes: the past rises up to meet her, surfacing like a corpse bobbing up from black water. Cytherea has understood, intellectually, that there would be other necromancers here, other cavaliers. It hadn’t seemed important, at the time. Not when weighed against the mission she’d set herself to complete. But here they are, the ghosts of everyone Cytherea once knew, brought back wrong to sleepwalk in the path laid out a myriad before.

It’s all she can do not to scream warning, right then and there.

Instead, she coughs, and tears a wracking hunk of flesh from deep inside her gut out into the world, an old, familiar hurt to complement the new.

They’re talking now. _She’s_ talking, autopilot as the rest of them cluster and Cytherea moves Protesilaus to respond, finally, appropriately. And- there.

The third, and final, blow.

This Ninth cavalier doesn’t see the expression of her necromancer, but Cytherea does. Black and hard and spiteful, as possessive as the plague.

Cytherea the First and the Reverend Daughter of the Ninth lock their gaze, and the black vestal looks away first.

Yes, Cytherea knows this story.

She was part of it, a terribly long time ago.


End file.
